We brewed a simple honey-wheat ale. To shake things up, we decided to make it a blueberry beer, so we added 5 pounds of frozen blueberries to the secondary fermentation and stirred it a few times. The berries added enough sugar that it bubbled for a day in the secondary fermenter. I've never seen that before. I wonder if all the sugar that went in will mean a higher alcohol yeild. (That's not the goal, it's just a question)
This is what 5 pounds of fermented blueberrys looks like:
For the record, fermented blueberries smell far more enticing than they taste. The yeast is remarkably effective at removing every last molecule of sugar from the berries, so they are actually fairly bitter. That also means that whatever makes blueberries smell great is not related to the sugar contained within.
I recommend straining the berries out of the beer before racking and bottling. They tend to break up and clog the hoses, limiting the amount of beer you can move around and generally causing trouble.We still got 51 bottles (normally it's around 54...), but it took a lot longer.
This is what a case of homebrew blueberry honey wheat ale looks like:
Hey, that song is actually one of my favorites. I have, on occasion, endeavored to find the musician/author, without avail. The limitless of the internet is no match for music riped from an mac OS 8-only app on a cd from a defunct 90's magazine.
ReplyDeleteI'm still amazed you fit the IIci in a backpack and peddled across town...